MDNA

Madonna's 12th studio album, featuring collaborations with M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, is the product of both a merger and a divorce.

Madonna's 12th studio album is the product of both a merger and a divorce, but as much as the singer attempts to milk the latter event for pathos over the course of its 16 tracks, the tone is mostly set by corporate dealmaking. MDNA is the star's first record as part of a $120 million deal with concert promotion juggernaut Live Nation and a separate three-album pact with Interscope, and like a lot of new records by artists of her stature, it's essentially a mechanism to promote a world tour that will inevitably drastically out-earn the profits from her new music. These sort of records don't need to be cynical or uninspired on an artistic level, but this one feels particularly hollow, the dead-eyed result of obligations, deadlines, and hedged bets.

Madonna has made her share of bad music in the past, but for the most part, her failures have come from taking artistic chances that didn't pay off, as on her experiments with hip-hop on American Life and Hard Candy. Large chunks of MDNA are shockingly banal, coming across not so much as bad pop songs per se, but as drably competent tunes better suited to D-list Madonna wannabes. The worst of these numbers were produced by French DJ Martin Solveig, whose anonymous, unimaginative arrangements for "Turn Up the Radio", "Give Me All Your Luvin'", "I Don't Give A", and "B-Day Song" are paired with excessively bland lyrics. The latter track, a collaboration with M.I.A., is horrifically regressive, the sound of two of pop's great feminist provocateurs joining forces for what amounts to a tacky children's song about birthday parties spiced up with a couple of tired double entendres. (Sorry ladies, Rihanna beat you to that frosting-licking line.)

Madonna's tracks with house duo the Benassi Bros. and William Orbit, the principal architect of her 1998 album Ray of Light, are much better, if not up to par with previous career highlights. "I'm Addicted", a dynamic electro throbber by the Benassis, is the big keeper here, and their work on "Girl Gone Wild" yields a reasonably strong single that rises to the challenge of competing with Ke$ha, Britney Spears, and Katy Perry on pop radio. The Orbit collaborations mainly call back to their work together on Ray, the record that essentially established the aesthetics of the singer's past decade of music. "I'm a Sinner" is a serviceable rewrite of their Ray-era soundtrack hit "Beautiful Stranger", and "Falling Free" plays to her strengths as a singer of ballads, though it lacks the generous hooks of, say, "Take a Bow" or "Live to Tell".

The most interesting of the Orbit productions is "Gang Bang", a campy revenge fantasy that essentially uses her filmmaker ex-husband Guy Ritchie's sub-Tarantino aesthetic as a weapon against him. The title suggests porn, but it's really a nod to mobsters, particularly as her over-the-top, Ana Matronic-esque monologue turns especially violent and bloody. It's the album's boldest, most experimental track, and it's marred only by a just-off vocal performance that renders her very familiar voice a bit anonymous, and a half-hearted attempt at a dubstep bass drop. (Next time just hire Skrillex, okay?)

Madonna reckons with her divorce from Ritchie elsewhere on the record, but her attempts to address lingering bitterness and affection for her ex are so remote that the songs have all the soul of a carefully edited press release. "Love Spent", an Orbit production with brittle electro-acoustic accompaniment, at least approaches the topic from an interesting angle, focusing on the tension and power dynamic of a relationship in which one half of the couple drastically out-earns the other. The song picks up steam as it goes along, but it ultimately comes out like a tepid, ponderous rework of her 2005 smash "Hung Up". "I Don't Give A" starts off strong with her spitting out the lines, "Wake up, ex-wife/ This is your life," in a robotic rap, but she is upstaged by guest Nicki Minaj, who turns in an entertaining performance that is nevertheless below the standards of her usual features.

It's almost impossible to approach MDNA without some degree of cynicism, but it's equally difficult to imagine anyone being more cynical about this music than Madonna herself. Unlike previous late-period records in which she had the luxury to indulge in creative tangents and not get too hung up on scoring several hits, MDNA is a record that comes with major commercial expectations. The "this has to work" factor is high, and it's hard to shake the impression that she has some measure of contempt for the contemporary pop audience. We all know that Madonna is an extremely intelligent woman-- even if she's never been known for penning great lyrics, it's easier to take the mesmerizingly dumb lyrics of tracks like "Superstar" and "B-Day Song" as spiteful trolling rather than vapid pandering. It doesn't really matter whether or not this drivel is insulting to Madonna's audience-- the most loyal fans seem to embrace being submissive to her domineering persona-- but it is disheartening when one of the most influential pop artists of the 20th century is tossing out the world's umpteen-millionth "Mickey" retread as a lead single. She's the one who deserves better.